Why You Shouldn’t Watch Trump’s Oval Office Address Tonight

After much “extraordinary debate” (aka feigned hand-wringing over the inevitable because news executives are suckers for Donald Trump ratings), the major TV networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—will broadcast President Trump’s Oval Office pitch for a U.S./Mexico border wall on Tuesday night. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News will also televise it. But just because TV brass deemed Trump worthy of prime-time air doesn’t mean viewers should dignify it with their eyeballs. I certainly won’t be giving my household Nielsen rating to the ballyhoo—just like I don’t read anti-vaxxer chains in mommy groups on Facebook or indulge Alex Jones’s vile Newtown conspiracy theories. Typically, I don’t actively seek out lies and propaganda—why start now?

Some people will say that not tuning in is the equivalent of thrusting your head into the sand and that a person must be informed about what the president has to say, like it or not. But do any of us really need to watch to know what’s coming? Is there any sense of mystery about what Trump will say tonight, when he makes his seemingly every half-baked thought available on Twitter nearly on the hour? Those who skip won’t be missing anything, nor, likely, hearing anything new. Trump has been rallying for a wall, without success, since his 2016 campaign, from the moment he declared his candidacy and swiftly characterized Mexicans as “rapists” and gang members. He will fear-and-hate-monger, stoke racist fires, and encourage demonization of brown people. The only difference is that now he has the weight of the presidential seal behind his flimsy, error-ridden argument. Put another way, “Trump wants to wring credibility out of the Oval Office to make a sales pitch that so far hasn’t taken hold,” Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump wrote on Tuesday.

Which isn’t even to mention the fact that Trump will spend his allotted eight minutes (good luck with that, when have we ever seen him keep to a timetable when the camera is trained on him?) probably lying through his teeth, as he is wont to do. Reportedly at issue for the networks was whether or not to provide a platform for Trump’s live, uninterrupted, deeply partisan political address: “How should a uniquely deceptive president be treated by TV networks that value the truth?” CNN’s Brian Stelter asked. How can anchors contextualize and fact-check his speech in real time, if at all? But clearly, a sense of precedence and duty took over—the notion that when a president—any president, even one who lies flagrantly—speaks from the Oval, networks have a responsibility to broadcast it.

This is nothing new: TV networks have only recently stopped beaming Trump rallies live in all of their vulgar, abusive, factually incorrect glory, and not due to a crisis of conscience: The ratings were no longer there. The only thing that moves the needle for the networks that, in large part, created this monster is for viewers to decline to watch. Trump may be playing the TV networks—one executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Stelter: “He calls us fake news all the time but needs access to airwaves and cable pipes to deliver his false narrative.” Why let him play us as viewers, too?

Why participate in a deeply tired spectacle, a reluctant partnership between Trump and the media he loves to hate? Trump’s speech will be covered like some combination of a circus and a political death match, devoid of substance and allowing lies to flow freely, as sagely predicted by former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien. “CNN will open with a big, dramatic animated graphic. With music. There will be a pre-game: talking head panelists talking about the wall. It will not include experts on immigration. The President will speak. There will be no timely fact-check,” she tweeted. Then, of course, there will be a “post-game”: “It will be framed as yes wall/no wall. Oh, everybody will be white—including the anchors. Much of the conversation will center on ‘how the President did,’ and less on the content.”

This all feels normal now, except that it’s not. In 2014, the major networks were loath to interrupt the likes of The Big Bang Theory and Bones for a President Obama speech on immigration. According to Politico at the time, a network source said the address would be too “overtly political.” Love me some David Boreanaz, but five years later and this excuse has already collapsed, because Trump’s wall pitch—which The New York Times recently revealed began less as a real policy idea and more as a “mnemonic device of sorts,” and a way to make sure Trump, “who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder . . . would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration”—will be just as, if not more, fiercely partisan a message, so much so that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have a rebuttal planned to follow Trump; it, too, will be given airtime.

Frankly, even if you skip Trump’s address, the coverage of it will be all-consuming and nearly unavoidable. Watch or not, you will be deluged by postmortems, hot takes, tweets, TV segments, and panel debates. You’ll get the gist, and hopefully you’ll get a distillation of the facts versus the fiction—all the more reason to reject it in real time. Crack open a book. Watch The Breakfast Club (on AMC, starting at 8:00 p.m. EST) or borrow the philosophy of those 2014 network insiders who didn’t dare cut into Big Bang for a presidential address. Sorry, Donald, but there’s a brand-new Below Deck on Bravo at 9:00 p.m. that simply can’t be interrupted by the likes of you.

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